Profile

Roger Ekirch is an award-winning author and a professor of history at Virginia Tech.  His writing has been translated into seven foreign languages. Although colonial America and the American Revolution remain his primary teaching interests, his research has ranged widely to include European as well as American history.

His new book, Birthright: The True Story of the Kidnapping of Jemmy Annelsey (W.W. Norton, 2010), recounts the real-life saga that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel, Kidnapped. Set against the volatile backdrop of Georgian Ireland, Birthright resurrects an extraordinary family drama of betrayal and loss, but also endurance, survival, and redemption.

In addition to scholarly articles in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly and Perspectives in American History, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Newsday.  His path-breaking research on the history of sleep, which has implications for the study of modern sleep disorders, has been profiled in publications ranging from the Smithsonian Magazine and the Financial Times to Applied Neurology and Psychiatric Times.  In an article in Scientific American Mind, Walter A. Brown, M.D. of Brown University Medical School marveled, “The source of this new assault on conventional thinking comes not from a drug company or a university research program but from a historian.” 

Earlier books have included Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775, published in 1987 by Clarendon/Oxford University Press; and At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (W.W. Norton, 2005), a sweeping study of nocturnal culture before the Industrial Revolution, which garnered four prizes, including an award given by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta for the “best subsequent book” in all fields of history.  His article in 2001, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” in the American Historical Review, earned two awards, including the James L. Clifford Prize given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.  

During Professor Ekirch’s career, he has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 1981-1982 he became the first Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University, where he taught in the Faculty of History and resided as a Fellow Commoner at Peterhouse.  In 1998, he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship “on the basis of unusually distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.”

In 2009, he received three awards in from Virginia Tech: the Alumni Award for Research Excellence (the highest award granted by the university for faculty scholarship); the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Scholarship; and the Faculty Excellence Award, presented annually by graduate students in the Department of History.

---

Personal Information